The Cosmic Tusk

Ian Evans is a secondary social studies teacher in Grand Junction, Colorado with eleven years in the classroom, a bachelor's in history, minors in economics and philosophy, and a master's in culturally and linguistically diverse education. He has been teaching the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis to his students for years, and he contacted George Howard not to express frustration with the mainstream but to show him a curriculum he has already built and ask how to get it further into the world.

George Howard's read on what makes this conversation different from most in this space is direct: most of the discourse around alternative history and mainstream textbooks is complaint without action. Ian represents the opposite, someone working inside the system as it exists, introducing catastrophism, ancient civilisation uncertainty, and the Younger Dryas evidence to middle and high school students through good educational practice, inquiry-based learning, and a responsible approach that does not charge in with what George calls the woo. His curriculum is available now at [email protected], and Ian has offered to work directly with any teacher who wants to adapt it for their own classroom.

The conversation covers the pathway that brought Ian into this community, starting with The Pyramid Code documentary during a student teaching placement at Denver East High School, which led him through John Anthony West, Robert Schoch, Graham Hancock, Klaus Schmidt, Andrew Collins, Greg Little, and eventually Randall Carlson. It covers the subjects he wants to see presented in schools: catastrophism, the Younger Dryas, the uncertainty around ancient history, the megafauna extinction, and the genuinely modern timeline of it all, including the white sands footprints that show a woman, a child, and a ground sloth in the same trackway, which became the most popular piece of Cosmic Summit content ever produced. And it covers why he believes the secondary school audience is the critical lever: the groundswell building in the alternative history community will break through the institutional resistance most effectively when children, raised on inquiry and exposed to the evidence, start asking the questions the textbooks cannot answer.

George has committed to hosting Ian's curriculum on the upcoming redesigned Cosmic Tusk website under the resources tab, alongside the existing Younger Dryas PowerPoints available for citizen educators and homeschool families. Ian's next phase is YouTube content to accompany the curriculum, including field trip guides to locations where the Younger Dryas black mat layer is visible across the United States.

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**CHAPTERS**

00:10 Introduction: Ian Evans and the vision for secondary education

03:00 Ian's background: Colorado, 11 years in the classroom, and the subjects he covers

05:20 The pathway in: The Pyramid Code, John Anthony West, Graham Hancock, and Randall Carlson

~20:00 The curriculum: what subjects, what approach, and why secondary school matters

~40:00 Practical steps: how to get this into classrooms without triggering institutional pushback

~55:00 The white sands footprints and why they were the most popular Cosmic Summit video ever

~60:00 The black mat layer, field trips, and making catastrophism tangible for young learners

01:06:37 Ian's email address and how to get the curriculum

01:07:33 George's plans for the Cosmic Tusk website and future collaboration

**GUESTS**

Ian Evans — [email protected]


**ABOUT**

TTN News covers the cosmic history that shaped this planet, the deep human past still buried in the ground, and the disclosure story unfolding right now, with primary sources and the people doing the work.

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Chris Cottrell of Dabbler’s Den has been one of the key researchers carrying the Carolina Bays investigation forward for a decade, and his conversation with George Howard on the Cosmic Tusk podcast covers the full arc of the research: where the community started, how the tools evolved, where the three main researchers diverge, and why Chris changed his publicly held position on the age of the bays after years of telling a different story on YouTube.

The foundational tool that opened the investigation to citizen researchers is the lidar overlay built by Michael Davis, who spent close to twenty years converting USGS lidar data into a format navigable on Google Earth, fitting ellipses to nearly 80,000 individual Carolina Bays, cataloguing each one with its length, orientation, and mathematical properties. The result became an accidental industry tool: wetland mitigation companies and university ecology programmes started using Davis's lidar independently of the Carolina Bays research, having discovered it was simply the best coastal plain elevation visualisation available. Tim Harris, a former Lockheed Martin and Boeing aerospace engineer, then applied the same orbital mechanics equations used for ballistic missiles to the elliptical orientation data and traced the radial pattern of the bays back to a single point of origin in the Saginaw Bay region of Michigan.

The chemical link to the Australasian tektite field, impact glass found across South Asia and Australia from an event 786,000 years ago whose source crater has never been identified, provides the most striking convergence. The chemical signature of the Australasian tektites matches the missing sandstone geology of the Michigan basin, and when Tim Harris ran the orbital math, the tektite field falls on the antipodal side of the planet from the proposed impact site. Chris Cottrell spent years publicly supporting a Younger Dryas origin for the bays alongside Antonio Zamora, and his shift came from the sea level record: if the bays were formed 12,800 years ago, they should appear along the entire coastline down to the lower elevations that were exposed at that time, but they are absent below roughly 30 feet, a threshold that corresponds precisely to the high water mark of the last interglacial period 125,000 years ago. That absence, he says, means the bays were already there and got washed away by sea level rise after they formed, placing their formation before 125,000 years ago, and in line with the 786,000-year Australasian tektite event.

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**CHAPTERS**

00:00 Introduction: George Howard and the Carolina Bays community

02:12 Chris Cottrell's origin story: the geology field trip and Ask Jeeves

05:27 Returning to the subject: the 2015 family hike and the YouTube channel

07:17 Three researchers, three hypotheses: Davis, Zamora, and Cottrell

07:52 Michael Davis's lidar tool and how it changed everything

14:57 The Nebraska rainwater basin and how the pattern extends westward

18:41 The Australasian tektites: 786,000 years and a missing impact site

22:02 Tim Harris, ballistic missile equations, and tracing the origin to Michigan

25:53 Why Chris changed his mind: the sea level argument

32:00 The Delmarva Peninsula anomaly and subsidence

35:00 Herndon Bay, Blythe Bay, and the field research

~60:00 The Arabian Bay dig: backhoes, sediment, and what they found

~90:00 Closing thoughts and what comes next

**GUESTS**

Chris Cottrell

YT Channel - @DabblersDen (https://studio.youtube.com/channel/UCJ8v7TydVhPpXGGi0XqCBpg)

Latest Book - https://us.amazon.com/Gone-But-Not-Forgotten-Catastrophe-ebook/dp/B0H35FGLRD

**ABOUT**

TTN News covers the cosmic history that shaped this planet, the deep human past still buried in the ground, and the disclosure story unfolding right now, with primary sources and the people doing the work.

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#TTNNews #CarolinaBays #GeorgeHoward #ChrisCottrell #CosmicTusk #DabblersDen #YoungerDryas #CatastrophismAustralasianTektites #ImpactHypothesis

PART TWO

In 1984, Dr. Greg Little published the first work connecting plasma physics to the UFO phenomenon, and forty years later his position has only solidified. This second conversation with George Howard picks up where part one ended and moves into territory that covers plasma, UAPs, the Zeitoun apparitions, Edgar Cayce, and four decades of expeditions to the Bahamas.

The plasma argument is grounded in physics rather than speculation. The Earth generates plasma through tectonic pressure and the piezoelectric effect, and Dr. Little's work with neuroscientist Michael Persinger at Laurentian University in the early 1990s established that swirling balls of electromagnetic energy focused on the temporal lobe could induce abduction experiences and UAP sightings in undergraduate students in a lab setting. The Zeitoun apparitions in Egypt in the early 1970s, where millions of people including Egyptian military investigators witnessed what appeared to be a luminous figure moving around a Coptic church for close to a year, are, in Dr. Little's framing, one of the best documented plasma events in the historical record, and he and his wife went to Egypt to interview witnesses and obtain the original newspaper coverage firsthand.

The final thread is Edgar Cayce, the ARE, and Bimini Road. Cayce predicted in the 1930s that evidence of Atlantis would be found in the Bahamas around 1968 or 1969, and a stone formation now known as Bimini Road was discovered underwater in the Bahamas in 1968. Dr. Little has led expeditions there for four decades, and the conversation covers what the team has found, what the evidence points toward, the glowing orbs his wife saw during one crossing, the five simultaneous waterspouts, and the electrical failure that left them without air conditioning and refrigeration in the middle of the ocean, catching fresh fish because there was nothing else to eat.

Subscribe and turn on notifications. New episodes come out every day.

**CHAPTERS**

00:00 Plasma, Carl Jung, and the archetype experience

~10:00 Michael Persinger, electromagnetic fields, and induced UAP experiences

~20:00 The Zeitoun apparitions: half a million witnesses and a year of documented events

~35:00 Origins of the Gods and the piezoelectric theory of UAP generation

~50:00 Edgar Cayce, the ARE, and what Cayce predicted about the Bahamas

~01:05:00 Bimini Road: discovery, expeditions, and forty years of research

~01:25:00 The Bahamas crossings: orbs, waterspouts, and the electrical failure

~01:35:00 What the evidence points toward and what comes next

**GUESTS**

Dr. Greg Little — https://x.com/DrGregLittle2

**COMET RESEARCH GROUP**

Donate to the Comet Research Group today and fund research that could change the history of civilization: https://cometresearchgroup.org/

**ABOUT**

TTN News covers the cosmic history that shaped this planet, the deep human past still buried in the ground, and the disclosure story unfolding right now, with primary sources and the people doing the work.

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#TTNNews #DrGregLittle #Plasma #UAP #EdgarCayce #BiminiRoad #Bahamas #Zeitoun #SentientPlasma

PART ONE

Dr. Greg Little has spent forty years mapping, researching, and documenting the mound builders of North America, and the number he keeps coming back to is one that most people are not prepared for: there were probably a million mounds spread across this continent, from the Aleutian Islands to Florida, from New York to California, and roughly 100,000 still exist today. George Howard sits down with him for the first of two conversations that cover the full scope of what that civilisation actually was.

The mounds range from small conical burial mounds a few feet high to platform complexes the scale of Cahokia, a walled city ten miles from Saint Louis that housed between 50,000 and 80,000 people around the year 1200 AD, was built in twenty years or less from scratch, and covered a footprint larger than the Great Pyramid. Dr. Little walks through the geometry of the earthworks and their astronomical alignments, the Path of Souls iconography connecting Orion and Cygnus across dozens of sites, and the haplogroup X question: a mitochondrial DNA signature found in the oldest mound skeletons that has no confirmed origin in Asia, and that Dr. Little believes traces back to the Denisovans moving through the Solutrean into North America from the west.

The second half of the conversation covers NAGPRA, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, and Dr. Little's position on it: honest, measured, and worth hearing from someone who has been in this field since 1983 and has watched the entire arc of how that legislation has shaped, and in his view suppressed, public access to the most important archaeological record in North America.

Subscribe and turn on notifications. Part two covers plasma, UAPs, Edgar Cayce, and the Bahamas.

**PART TWO LANDS MONDAY 22ND JUNE 2026**

**CHAPTERS**

00:00 Introduction and the mound encyclopaedia

02:15 How many mounds were there and how many remain

08:24 A million mounds: the calculation

12:05 Cahokia, Saint Louis, and the city nobody talks about

25:15 North Carolina, shell mounds, and the coastal record

36:25 Astronomical alignments and the Path of Souls

48:08 Mass migrations, Chaco Canyon, and Teotihuacan trade routes

53:45 The LSU mounds and the oldest known mound in the Americas

01:01:02 Haplogroup X, the Denisovans, and the Solutrean hypothesis

01:16:14 NAGPRA: what it is, what it has done, and Dr. Little's position

01:17:24 Giant skeletons: the Smithsonian reports and the statistical analysis

01:30:15 Cherokee DNA, the Milford menorah, and Middle Eastern haplogroups in North America

**GUESTS**

Dr. Greg Little — https://x.com/DrGregLittle2

**COMET RESEARCH GROUP**

Donate to the Comet Research Group today and fund research that could change the history of civilization: https://cometresearchgroup.org/

**ABOUT**

TTN News covers the cosmic history that shaped this planet, the deep human past still buried in the ground, and the disclosure story unfolding right now, with primary sources and the people doing the work.

**FOLLOW TTN NEWS**

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#TTNNews #DrGregLittle #MoundBuilders #Cahokia #HaplogroupX #NativeAmerica #YoungerDryas #NAGPRA

The Cosmic Tusk Podcast brings together George Howard and Randall Carlson for a wide-ranging conversation that moves from the megaflood geology of the Canadian Shield to the Younger Dryas boundary, through Monument Valley and the Colorado Plateau, and finally to Plato, Ignatius Donnelly, and what the original text of Timaeus and Critias actually says about Atlantis.

The geological thread runs through the whole episode. Randall makes the case that Lake Agassi formed not gradually but near-instantaneously, as the direct byproduct of multiple cosmic impacts over the Laurentide Ice Sheet, and walks through the Lake Nipigon basin as a candidate impact site with erosional signatures consistent with the Channeled Scablands. He then turns to Monument Valley, arguing that the buttes, mesas, and slot canyons of the Colorado Plateau bear the fingerprints of catastrophic water flows on a scale nobody in mainstream geology has yet addressed directly. The pattern he keeps returning to is the same one that took decades to accept in Washington State: the landscape cannot be explained one drop at a time.

The Atlantis section closes the episode. Randall is careful about what he is and is not claiming. He has read Plato in the original Greek, and his position is that the geological dismissal of Atlantis published in 1977 relied on plate tectonics to rule out a sunken Atlantic landmass, while openly acknowledging that less than a fraction of a percent of the ocean floor had been explored at the time. The book declared the case closed. The ocean had barely been opened.

**CHAPTERS**
00:00 Introduction and catching up
~05:00 Lake Agassi, Lake Nipigon, and megaflood geology of the Canadian Shield
~27:00 Instantaneous formation hypothesis and the Younger Dryas boundary
~43:00 James Teller's work and the extraterrestrial event paper
~50:00 Randall's viral Monument Valley clip and the Colorado Plateau
~60:00 Atlantis, Ignatius Donnelly, and going back to Plato

**GUESTS**
Randall Carlson - @TheRandallCarlson (https://studio.youtube.com/channel/UCAPciy143ZBXBrFpCVPnWDg)

ABOUT
TTN News covers the cosmic history that shaped this planet, the deep human past still buried in the ground, and the disclosure story unfolding right now, with primary sources and the people doing the work.

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#TTNNews #YoungerDryas #UAPDisclosure

For more information & to stay up to date: https://thetitan.network/

Paul Schatzkin is the author of two books that George Howard considers among the most important and least known in the alternative science space - The Boy Who Invented Television and The Man Who Mastered Gravity. This episode focuses primarily on the first, marking the 100th anniversary of the invention that became the most ubiquitous technology on the planet, but the conversation inevitably extends into the deeper and more troubling story of what Philo Farnsworth did after television was finished with him.

The origin story of television is extraordinary precisely because it has been almost entirely lost. Philo T. Farnsworth was born in 1906 to a Mormon farming family in Beaver, Utah, grew up on the frontier without electricity, and by the age of twelve was repairing the Delco generator on his family's Idaho homestead better than any adult could. He was a native of Einstein's universe - born the year after the 1905 papers, he grew up treating relativity and quantum mechanics as background reality rather than revolutionary novelty. In the summer of 1921, plowing a field under the Idaho sun at age fourteen, he looked back at the parallel rows he had carved and in that moment understood how to create an electrical counterpart to an optical image and scan it one line at a time on a magnetically deflected beam of electrons. He drew the concept on a chalkboard for his high school science teacher in 1922. He demonstrated the first working all-electronic television in 1927. The sketch and the working tube are essentially the same device. Every screen on Earth traces its lineage to that field in Idaho.

The reason Farnsworth's name is not as universally known as Edison or the Wright Brothers comes down to three factors Paul identifies with precision. Farnsworth himself was constitutionally uninterested in his past achievements and had moved on from television by the late 1930s. Numerous pretenders - most significantly David Sarnoff's RCA, whose engineers reverse-engineered Farnsworth's patents after a young engineer named Vladimir Zworykin visited his laboratory under the pretence of collaboration - spent decades attempting to claim the invention. And when Farnsworth Television and Radio was acquired by ITT in 1949 for pennies on the dollar, the institutional memory of the invention's true origin was extinguished with it.

The deeper story is what Farnsworth turned his attention to after television. Declining an invitation to participate in the Manhattan Project in 1941 - telling his wife he believed they were building an atomic bomb and wanted no part of it - he spent the war in his private laboratory in Maine, working at the quantum level on problems that only he fully understood. A chance encounter in 1948 led to a phone call with Albert Einstein, in which Farnsworth described his nascent ideas about nuclear fusion. Einstein, despondent since Hiroshima and Nagasaki about what his theories had been used for, told Farnsworth these are the good parts of my theories - you must continue this work. In 1953, on a drive through the Utah desert, Farnsworth had the conception for inertial electrostatic confinement - a fusion approach using a reactor the size of a softball rather than a gymnasium, requiring no superconducting magnets or incomprehensible engineering complexity. He spent six years doing the mathematics before building anything. The machines produced neutron fluxes on the order of 100 billion neutrons per second - proof of fusion. A portable demonstration unit was wheeled into an Atomic Energy Commission meeting in Washington and plugged into a wall. The institutional response was not excitement. It was a room full of people representing vested interests in existing plasma physics programmes, and a chairman who leaned back and asked whose budget was this going to come out of.

Farnsworth died in 1971. A journal discovered after his death had seven pages torn out. His widow's note on the last remaining page said his final ideas he felt were too confidential - that mankind was not ready for them and perhaps not worthy. Paul has been telling this story to anyone who will listen since he first heard it on a hillside overlooking the Pacific Ocean in the summer of 1973.

Paul Schatzkin’s books: https://www.amazon.co.uk/stores/author/B0C15BQDPC

Michael Donnellan is the producer and director of Atlantica - a three-season documentary series ten years in the making, currently in a distribution bidding war, with Sky History Channel filming an episode at the site in June. George Howard, who attended the Cosmic Summit premiere of the first episode, has been sitting on the story for nearly a year while the rest of the world waits. This conversation is a wide-ranging update on everything that has happened since.

The case for Cadiz as the location of Atlantis's capital city begins with Plato himself. The Timaeus and Critias name the area of Gadis - modern Cadiz - as the location of the capital. Michael notes that in Plato's time this was not an obscure reference. The Greeks had already colonised the coastline, founded the city of Portus Menesthei at what is now El Puerto de Santa Maria, and vacationed in the region regularly. Saying Atlantis was near Cadiz in 360 BC was the equivalent of saying it was near New York. Everyone would have known exactly where you meant. What Michael and his team have spent a decade documenting is the physical evidence: structures visible only at low tide along the coastlines of Sanlucar de Barrameda and the surrounding area, older foundations beneath the famous Phoenician fishing corrals, a submerged city 3.5 kilometres offshore at 20 metres depth, and a rocky outcrop visible from the cathedral whose Arabic name - Sal Medina, meaning the lost city - tells you that even a thousand years ago local people knew something had once been there. The February 2025 storms stripped sand from a clay sediment layer that had not been exposed in thousands of years, revealing cut marks resembling those found in Malta and, crucially, elephant bones from the Upper Palaeolithic period - physical confirmation that the elephants Plato explicitly mentions as part of the Atlantean economy were genuinely present in this region at the relevant time.

The Tartessos - the mysterious pre-Phoenician Iberian culture whose origins could extend back six to seven thousand years, whose script remains undeciphered, and who possessed written laws that Greek historian Strabo dated 6,000 years before his own time - are Michael's candidates for the post-catastrophe survivors of the Atlantean civilisation. Their naval expertise, metallurgy, and trading networks mirror the Atlantean characteristics Plato describes precisely. The Younger Dryas catastrophe, which Michael personally favours as a cosmic impact event, would have driven coastal survivors into the caves now found throughout the mountains of Andalusia - caves that show evidence of human habitation across 35,000 years, including prehistoric paintings of industrial-scale fishing fleets pursuing orca. The megalithic culture that subsequently emerged - concentrated more heavily in southwestern Iberia than anywhere else in Europe, with the oldest dolmens in the world among its remnants - represents, in Michael's reading, the engineering knowledge of a pre-catastrophe civilisation reasserting itself through the hands of people who remembered what their ancestors had built.

The episode also covers the archives of the Palace of Medina Sidonia, which Michael was finally granted access to two months before this recording. The last Duchess wrote extensively on the evidence that Columbus was not the first European to cross the Atlantic - knowledge preserved in one of the oldest private archives in Europe, held by a family whose name encodes the Arabic words for city of Sidon, and whose position controlling the trade routes in and out of the Mediterranean placed them at the centre of the pre-Columbian Atlantic knowledge network. In the third season, Michael says, he will prove it. The conversation also touches on the second Sphinx debate, the Egyptian priests of Sais who told Solon that both Greeks and Egyptians were descended from the Atlantean civilisation, and the straightforward strategic logic of why any maritime empire controlling the Mediterranean would have placed its capital exactly where Cadiz now stands.

Discover more from Michael Donnellan and Ingenio Films: https://ingeniofilms.com/films/atlantica/

George Howard sits down with Matt Barone - geometry teacher, podcast host of Curious Dimension, and one of the more methodical independent researchers working at the intersection of sacred geometry, UAP phenomena, and ancient site analysis. What begins as a conversation about the mathematics underlying Giza quickly expands into one of the more unusual episodes the Cosmic Tusk has produced - pulling together a 1980 UFO encounter in England, a 16-page binary code, seven sets of ancient coordinates, and a precessional timeline encoded into the layout of the queens' pyramids at Giza.

The centrepiece of Matt's presentation is the Rendlesham Forest incident of December 1980, in which US Air Force Staff Sergeant Jim Peniston approached an unidentified triangular craft in the forest between two military bases in Suffolk, England. Peniston touched the craft, felt hieroglyphic symbols etched into its surface, and experienced what he described as a download of ones and zeros transmitted directly into his mind. He transcribed 16 pages of binary code into his notebook and kept them hidden for 30 years - never mentioning them until a 2010 Ancient Aliens episode brought them to the attention of UFO researcher Linda Moulton Howe. Three independent parties decoded the binary simultaneously and arrived at the same result: seven sets of global coordinates, a reference to the year 8100, the phrase eyes of your eyes, and the instruction continuous for planetary advance. One of those coordinates points to a location on the Giza Plateau eerily close to where Filippo Biondi's radar demography places the second Sphinx. The code, Matt notes, only works if generated in 1980 - because the Giza Plateau has been drifting northeast at 1-2 centimetres per year due to continental plate movement, and the geometry produced by those coordinates only resolves correctly when calculated against the plateau's 1980 position.

From there Matt walks through the geometric work of researcher Gary Osborne, who used precision distance calculators to demonstrate that the Giza diagonal - the line connecting the corner queens' pyramids of G1 and G3 - encodes a fractional unit of the precessional cycle in royal Egyptian cubits, resolves to whole-number distances in feet, inches, yards, and pi-meters simultaneously, and functions as a precessional timeline in which the midpoint corresponds to approximately 520 AD - a period George immediately connects to the catastrophic climate crash of 536 AD. The conversation then moves to 19.47 degrees latitude, the geometric signature of a tetrahedron inscribed within a sphere - a number that appears at energetically anomalous locations on Earth, at the Cydonia plateau on Mars, and embedded within Richard Hoagland's analysis of the Face on Mars. Matt closes with the broader disclosure picture: his reading is that the public is being deliberately primed for limited disclosure, that classified materials science and reverse-engineered physics will not be released, but that high-resolution footage of objects moving in ways that defy conventional propulsion is likely coming - and that the Viking Mars life detection result, which returned positive and was retroactively reclassified as a false positive that has never been reproduced, remains one of the most consequential and least acknowledged stories in the history of science.

Check out more from Matt Barone:

https://www.youtube.com/@CuriousDimension

https://curiousdimension.com

Learn more about and contribute towards the Comet Research Group: https://cometresearchgroup.org/

Allen West has never appeared on a podcast before this conversation.

For nearly two decades, he has been the principal researcher and lead author behind the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, the proposal that a massive comet or its debris struck the Earth approximately 12,800 years ago, triggering the sudden return to Ice Age conditions, the extinction of tens of millions of megafauna across North America and Siberia, and the disappearance of the Clovis culture. In this landmark first interview, George Howard, founder of the Cosmic Tusk and one of the earliest supporters of the hypothesis, sits down with Allen to tell the full story of how the research began, what the evidence actually shows, and why the scientific establishment has fought so hard to suppress it.
The hypothesis originated almost by accident. Allen had retired from running a geophysical consulting company and was writing a book about cosmic threats when he came across a paper by Rick Firestone and Bill Topping describing tiny magnetic spherules in Michigan sediment. That discovery led Allen to Ted Bunch, a retired NASA administrator who had worked on the Apollo moon rocks and helped the Alvarez team identify the K-Pg impact that killed the dinosaurs. Bunch examined the Younger Dryas boundary layer material and found the same suite of impact markers: shock quartz, nanodiamonds, melted spherules, carbon spherules, and high-temperature soot. What had started as a book became one of the most widely read scientific papers in modern history. The original 2007 Firestone paper ranks in the top five hundredths of one percent of all scientific publications ever tracked, and their Tall el-Hammam paper on a Bronze Age airburst over the Jordan Valley was accessed by 732,000 readers and ranked as the 26th most-read paper in the history of Nature. [~00:00 to ~00:32]
Allen describes in detail how that success provoked a sustained campaign of suppression. Over the last three years, 20 out of 21 submitted papers have been rejected or retracted. One paper was sent to six different journals and reviewed by 15 scientists, ten of whom recommended publication, but editors rejected it based on the objections of five hostile reviewers. The Tall el-Hammam paper was retracted by Nature five years after publication with no substantive reason given beyond a loss of confidence in the data. A PBS Nova documentary covering the research was pulled from Nova's own platform after critics lobbied the network, claiming it would damage their federal funding. Allen explains the financial mechanics behind journal suppression: controversial papers escalate to salaried in-house editors, costing journals money, creating an incentive to simply retract and move on. Forced out of mainstream journals, the Comet Research Group created its own peer-reviewed publication, Airburst and Cratering Impacts, where their rebuttal to the Holliday attack paper has drawn 41,000 readers compared to a few thousand for the original criticism. [~00:16 to ~01:00]
The conversation then turns to the physical evidence itself. At Murray Springs, Arizona, Allen collected samples from the exact layer draping a mammoth skeleton, finding every marker of a cosmic impact event. No mammoth skeleton and no Clovis point has ever been found above that layer anywhere in the American Southwest. An African elephant expert determined the animal could not have been dead for more than two weeks when the event occurred. Allen explains Bill Napier's calculation that the parent comet was at least 100 kilometres wide, and that Earth likely passed through its debris trail rather than being struck by the main body. He describes indigenous oral traditions from the Hudson River Valley and the Great Lakes region that describe a long-tailed star setting forests ablaze and killing giant animals, accounts that predate European contact. The episode closes with a discussion of the Hiawatha crater in Greenland, dated to roughly 58 million years ago by one team but displaying a pristine rim that Allen argues is inconsistent with tens of millions of years of glacial erosion, and the revelation that Wally Broecker, eulogised by the New York Times as the grandfather of climate science, wrote in a private memo before his death that he had come to believe the Younger Dryas was initiated by an impact. [~01:00 to ~01:24]

Learn more about the Comet Research Group: https://cometresearchgroup.org/

George Howard sits down with Daniel Hodges of the Hodge Cast for a conversation that moves from the frontlines of the second Sphinx debate to the collapse of free speech in Britain, held together by a single recurring theme - why intelligent people keep shutting things down before they have done the work.

The Filippo Biondi situation is live as they record. George's frustration is not with mainstream sceptics but with members of the alternative community dismissing Biondi's second Sphinx findings without visiting his website or engaging with his methodology. He made a public $100 wager with a prominent figure who put the odds of Biondi's research at 100 to 1. The wager was declined. George calls it the Presbyterian and Methodist problem - factionalism within a community is often more hostile than anything directed outward.

He also revisits the Malcolm Bendall thunderstorm generator - a clean energy device he tested extensively that has since grown to an industrial-scale installation in Australia. He remains comfortable with ambiguity, but notes someone is spending serious money on something that had better work.

Daniel brings the conversation to Britain - 12,000 social media arrests in a year, a mother jailed for two and a half years for a tweet while grooming gang members walked free with two years, and a writer detained by seven armed police at Heathrow for a joke on X. Both men land in the same place: staying genuinely curious, resisting the urge to decide before you understand, is rarer and more valuable than either side of any argument tends to acknowledge.

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Z5KZ2cui8WDjyF6gJ/some-thoughts-on-toby-ord-s-existential-risk-estimates

https://cosmictusk.com/wally-broecker-says-a-cosmic-impact-caused-the-younger-dryas/

https://www.carolinajournal.com/opinion/uncovered-risks-no-oversight-of-uncs-extreme-virology/

Enjoy this conversation? Catch more here: https://youtu.be/wULC5AJ3mqI?si=ryd5CW5X_SAgOpsW